Hedy's Folly

  Hedy’s opinion of business matters was evidently the only opinion Mandl welcomed from his wife. “Soon I knew that as in my own house I had nothing to say, so in my own life I had nothing to say either. And as I, too, am an autocrat, disaster was inevitable.” The dining room of the Mandls’ house was hung with Gobelin tapestries, the windows glazed with antique stained glass. The “huge, long table” that ran down the center of the room seated twenty-four, and Mandl had bought himself what he called “a nice Christmas present” one year of a solid-gold table service. Hedy remembered the long table covered thick one dinner-party evening with blue violets, “and in these blue violets were scattered lots and lots of orchids so that it was all a deep rich blue and with those golden dishes, it looked but fantastic.”

  In the midst of such lavish abundance, Hedy said, “we entertained and were entertained by diplomats and men of high political position, makers and breakers of dynasties, financiers who manipulate the stock exchanges of the world.” Mussolini was a guest, Austrian and German generals and admirals, but not Hitler: the Nazis classified Mandl as a Jew—“the Jew, Mandl,” Joseph Goebbels would call him contemptuously in a 1937 speech. Hedy was reduced to a graceful automaton by the protocol of such events, by her husband’s expectations of her, and by her own indifference as well. “I did not do more than smile when I should smile and look grave when I should look grave. I was not interested enough in these things to play an active part in them.”

  She was not deaf, however. She listened to what was said. She was far more intelligent than her husband and his guests gave her credit for. “Any girl can be glamorous,” she would famously say. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” She did, but she listened and learned.

  She and her powerful husband were not always unhappy. “There were times when we had fun together,” she said. “There were times when we were good friends.… There were times when we went on hunting trips together, the two of us alone. We would sit for long hours concealed behind a camouflage waiting for our quarry. There were long hours of solitude and silence which, I think, we shared happily.”

  But Mandl was an insecure and jealous man. He assigned someone among their servants to listen in to Hedy’s phone calls. If she spoke the word “picture,” he was livid, even if she only happened to be discussing something to hang on the wall. “He was always afraid that I would try to go back to the stage,” she said, “back to pictures. At such times he would always taunt me with Ecstasy, hurl reproaches and cruelties at me.” When they dined out, he brooded in constant surveillance. “My husband would sit there smoking and watching me, watching me and not speaking at all except to say now and then, ‘Who are you looking at? Who is there at that table where you are looking?’ Things like that. At first I tried always to explain, to laugh at him for being so foolish about nothing. But then, after a time, I did not try to explain at all. It was useless.”

  Early in 1935, everything changed for Hedy. She had already made two attempts to escape, she would claim, “but both times I was caught and brought back. And I was watched and guarded more closely than ever.” What changed was her father, the person to whom she had always been closest. “One night we were all at dinner at one of our hunting lodges where we were spending a holiday,” she said. “In the middle of dinner my father rose from the table and asked to be excused. His face was white, his eyes were strange, and I felt a sickness at my heart. I felt that something must be wrong with him, very wrong.”

  The next day Emil Kiesler seemed better. He denied that anything was wrong with him. “But still he did not seem to ever be quite himself again after that night,” Hedy said. “He looked tired and he gave up many of the sports at which he had always excelled. He worried me and every day I went to my parents’ apartment to see him.”

  Then one day it was too late:

  I was out driving with a woman friend of mine. We drove finally to the apartment house where my parents lived. My mother, I knew, was out. My father was out, too, I thought, it being early in the afternoon, not more than two o’clock. Well, I would wait for a while and then go up. And so we sat in the car and talked, my friend and I. We must have sat there talking for half an hour.… At last I happened to glance up at the windows of my parents’ apartment. And it was as if some icy hand had caught my heart. I think I knew right then.

  “Look,” I said, “the shades are all drawn! Why should they have the shades drawn at two o’clock in the afternoon?”

  I jumped out of the car as if I were shot and rushed up the stairs. I opened the door of the apartment, realizing that it was strange I did not have to ring or knock or use my key. A strange man met me in the hall. I saw other strangers there, one or two neighbors standing about.… The strange man said to me, “Are you the daughter?” I said that I was. And then he told me that my father had passed away twenty minutes ago.

  So while I had been sitting outside in that car, while I had been talking of little nothings, while I had been so near him, my father was dying, alone.

  Emil Kiesler died of a massive heart attack. An attack of angina with its severe pain had driven him from the dinner table when Hedy had first realized that he was ill. In the family apartment, after his body was removed, she found a cigarette box on which he had scrawled—“in his last agony,” she thought—“Please, Hedy, take good care of Mother.”

  She grieved for a year. “I wore black, nothing but black. I couldn’t face any colors. I couldn’t see a mirror. I couldn’t face people. Wherever I went I could see my father as I had seen him last. And during all this time—I must say this—my husband was very kind to me, very helpful to us all.” After a year she recognized that it was time to cease grieving. “It was not fair to my mother.… It was not fair to my father. He would have disliked such grief.”

  Great trauma is always transformative. Identity shatters and with luck a new identity forms. Hedy had changed, as she knew. “From the moment of his death I was completely changed,” she said. She had tolerated a bad marriage while her father was alive. “Now I knew that I must run away, must escape, must make my plans to go to Hollywood. I had met death for the first time and death had shown me, among other things, how brief life is. I must have my life, the only life I ever really wanted, before it ran away from me into the dark.”

  Escape would not be easy. It would take time and planning. It might even take blackmail. She could blackmail Mandl into letting her go if she acquired business secrets he would fear to see revealed. She would have to be a sponge when the German admirals and generals came to dine with them. All she had to do was look glamorous and listen. That was all Fritz expected of her anyway.

  ——

  By autumn 1933, George and Boski Antheil had settled into an apartment on the top floor of a brownstone at 51 East Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan. Antheil’s opera Helen Retires was well along in rehearsals at the Juilliard School of Music. It was based on the 1925 novel The Private Life of Helen of Troy by the novelist, pianist, composer, Columbia University humanities professor, and Juilliard president John Erskine, who also wrote the libretto for the opera. (In 1927, Alexander Korda had directed a silent film based on the novel as well, with his actress wife, María, playing Helen.)

  “Things were pretty tough,” Boski recalled of this period in their lives. “Emotionally and financially. George had been away from America for a long time, and was almost considered as a European composer, so it was difficult for him to get into the swim of American life. His works were not played, for the Ballet mécanique was still remembered.… And it was, as usual, in spite of no money, an interesting and stimulating life.” Their apartment had three “enormous” rooms, Boski said, all leading off individually from a main hallway. The rent was low, but they decided to sublet the third room anyway to share the cost. For recreation, besides music and the parties they held with wine or punch to help the conversation flow, there was always the spectacle of the city:

  We also had the roof to ourselves and spent many
hot evenings there, and George again assembled his telescope.… And although we did look at the stars often enough, we used the terrestrial lens and had interesting views of the skyscraper apartments. I always think it is so funny when people live in one of the high stories of such an apartment, they never think that anyone can look at them. Although we did not see anything spectacular, it was interesting to watch people eat, work, argue, without hearing what the words were.

  Antheil had the pleasure of reuniting with his family again; his younger brother Henry was clamoring to follow in his footsteps to Europe:

  We are around our family dining table over the shoe store on Broad Street. Henry, my brother, is there … and dreaming of going abroad—the wanderlust is strong in all of us. Justine, my sister, is there; she is young and smaller than Henry, and like most girls is particularly close to her father whom she adores. Dear mother is in the kitchen making wonderful mashed potatoes and bringing in the pot roast. Boski, my wife, and I are there too. Dad sits there, utterly delighted. Henry and I kid one another, and Justine joins in.…

  Dad, in his quiet way, sits in the middle of this scene, and dominates it. He considers Boski as another daughter, loves her as his own. These are his children. He looks very happy. There are many such days, week upon week.

  Henry, born in 1912, enrolled at Rutgers University in 1931 after graduating from high school. He had continued to urge his older brother to help him travel abroad, and when George returned to the United States in 1933, he put Henry in touch with Bill Bullitt. The Antheils’ wealthy friend from Paris had returned to politics and government with the election of Franklin Roosevelt; the president had just appointed him to be the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. “Bill told me to send Henry down immediately,” George recalled. “Henry went and talked Bill into taking him with him to Russia, although Henry had not yet finished whatever kind of diplomat’s course he was taking at Rutgers.”

  Bullitt, Henry and “a whole coterie of young people” left for the Soviet Union in February 1934—“before the premiere of Helen Retires” at Juilliard on 28 February, Antheil writes, “which was probably just as well. Helen Retires flopped.”

  The failure of his opera, following upon the earlier American failure of Ballet mécanique, battered Antheil to a compositional standstill. “Bewildered,” he wrote, “I stopped composing for a time … to think things over.” The hiatus would last six years. Later he would call this period of inactivity both “a great plus and a great minus. It was a great plus in that it permitted me to study, for five or six years, with no other idea in mind except to learn everything about the music of the past that I could. During this time, for instance, I analyzed every great symphony or great chamber work available; and this analysis was not a schoolboy one, but made in great detail and with painstaking care.” It was a great minus because “no compositions of mine were played before the American or international public. I refused to allow those already written to be played; I also refused (until I was ready) to write new ones.”

  Whether or not he was willing to work toward new art, he still had to make a living. George Balanchine, one of the few who had actually liked Helen Retires, commissioned him to write a ballet—as it turned out, the first of several for the Russian choreographer. It was supposed to be “American,” Antheil writes, and it would be, but the dances that Balanchine’s American Ballet troupe presented were “pure Paris à la Russe.” Antheil was hungry enough, and therefore flexible enough, to write in the style Balanchine wanted, which Antheil calls “an American ballet sufficiently Parisian!” He also composed two dance ballets for Martha Graham in 1934 and 1935.

  Another opportunity emerged when a successful team of theater and film writers, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, came east from Hollywood to Paramount Studios in Astoria, New York, across the East River from Manhattan, with enough funding to make six films. When their music director, Oscar Levant, quit, early in the project, they engaged Antheil to score the first of the six. “I had to accept this offer,” Antheil explained warily to Mrs. Bok, “not because of the money, which actually is very very little considering the enormous amount of work entailed, but because if my music to this film is successful, it will be a way of earning a living, possibly the only way that a composer can make a living in the United States; certainly it is absolutely impossible any other way.”

  Hecht remembered a more beneficent collaboration. “MacArthur and I lured Antheil into making money by writing music for movies,” he recalled. They shot the first film in the series, Once in a Blue Moon, “in the woodlands adjoining the elegant town of Tuxedo, New York.” Since the picture was “100% music,” Antheil wrote to Mrs. Bok, the story of a clown “which has as its background Russia,” George was needed on the set during filming; he and Boski lived on location that summer of 1934 with the cast and crew “in a ‘Russian’ village reproduced exactly from some original in Russia by our expert movie-set men.” It felt like a paid vacation, Antheil wrote later, and “one of the nicest” he’d had.

  “With us,” Hecht recalled, “were gypsy dancers and fiddlers, Russian clowns and aristocrat refugees, famous wrestlers and pugilists, lady vocalists, swimmers, fortune-tellers, and a gallery of admiring debutantes” from the wealthy enclave of Tuxedo Park nearby. The picture would be a flop—too many nearly unintelligible foreign accents in the cast, Hecht suspected—but he thought Antheil’s music “was delightful. I have never heard a merrier collection of waltzes, polkas, and background tunes than came out of its sound track. George wrote melodies as if he had never heard or written a note of modern music.” Even one of the animal characters had its theme. “There was a sway-backed old horse named Bombonetti in the picture. What tunes Antheil wrote for this decrepit nag, Bombonetti! With belly sagging and head hanging, our weary Bombonetti seemed to be dreaming always of spring days and of nymph horses neighing in the glades.”

  There was hell to pay with Mrs. Bok when summer ended. Evidently, she was no fan of movie music. In September, back in Manhattan, Antheil wrote to her to report all the work he was accomplishing and to put his turn toward Hollywood in the best possible light:

  This summer has been very fruitful, and I have worked hard, and there is quite a lot of new manuscript and new situations and new opportunities.… I began working upon my symphony, a new one which I had hoped to enter for the Paderewski Prize, ending upon the 1st of October. I finished considerable of the new symphony when a new situation arose. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, authors of movies like “Viva Villa” and “Twentieth Century” and a host of other successes … gave me the job of writing the entire music to [their] first picture.…

  This, however, prevented me from finishing my symphony, and also lost me the opportunity to write a ballet for Ruth Page and Harald Kreutzberg.… However, [Page and Kreutzberg] wished only to pay me $200 for this enormous score, and a whole summer’s work.

  Nevertheless, Antheil went on for pages, “I really think that I deserve my salt as a young idealistic struggling earnest American composer.” He had “more performances this season than any other of my colleagues. Still they are subsidized and I am not.” It was “not so much the [lack of] leisure, but also the nervous tension. One comes back to one’s native land and sees that one has been abandoned.” He hated to ask her, who had been so good a friend, “but the time has arrived when I must either turn to Hollywood and its great organization, and become a part of its mill … or be a subsidized symphonic and operatic composer because I am part of that great hope of America for a music of its own”:

  If you, who are the only farseeing person in America, as far as I am concerned, abandon us, what shall we do? We can only do what we must do in a country unsympathetic to creative musical art, however sympathetic it might be to REcreative musical art. We must accept the verdict and turn to the beerhall Hollywood robber barons, and be a part of their marauding outfit.

  Three days later he wrote to her again asking her to provide him with a monthly subsidy so t
hat he could devote himself entirely to his music. That, finally, was enough for Mary Louise Curtis Bok. She replied apocalyptically on 28 September 1934:

  My dear George:

  … I must say [your letter] is no different than letters I have received from you over a long period of years, and while I am sorry to put any further discouragements in your path, I do not feel inclined to do what you ask and provide you with a monthly stipend. To do so would imply an interest in your work that I really do not have.…

  I have watched the quality of your work—not always, it is true, through my own eyes, but I have kept tabs on it through various people in the musical world whose judgment I trust. Not once have they reported favorably to me of your output.

  I know all your arguments as to lack of success, and quite evidently you place the blame anywhere but on yourself. Your egoism has displeased me, for it transcends a rational self-confidence. The successes you quote in your letters to me have never had the endorsement of those whose judgment I trust.…

  That I have advanced sums the past years has been simply from humanitarian reasons, knowing how badly up against it you and your wife were. If I do not at last speak out and tell you this you will continue to be misled, interpreting my assistance as my faith in your musical gift, which faith has, alas, become nil.

  Now, my dear George, you know how I feel about it, and I think you must make up your mind to stand on your own feet and make your own living.